Spam, spam, spam, spam.  The classic Monty Python song runs through my head whenever I open my GMail Inbox.  What I really don’t understand, though, is why so many spammers use such stupid ways to “promote” their product.

Here is a classic example that I’m sure most of you have seen over the last few years.  You fire off a quick tweet saying how you like or dislike a certain type of product, service, or market, and then suddenly you have several new followers who just happen to promote that particular product, service, or market.  While this seems like a decent idea for people who say they “like” or “love” something, it’s really not that great an idea for those of us who have just tweeted a genuine beef like the following:

Within 1 minute of this message hitting Twitter’s stream, I had this email waiting for me:

Twitter | Real Estate Experts

I can understand why marketers would think it’s a good idea to watch a text stream consisting of several billion publicly shared messages for particular keywords and then finding ways to reach out to those potential customers, but it would be nice if they had a little more logic behind their automated systems.

If you click the email, you’ll see the messages these supposed Real Estate “Experts” are spreading to their thousands of followers.  Some of these may be useful (for Americans), but they’re almost completely useless to people living outside a certain geographical location.  Profiles that fall outside a specified area should be ignored for the sake of protecting brand image.

Here are some of the rules that I would like to see implemented in the Twitter auto-follow bots that try to peddle their wares:

  1. messages originating from outside the target market should be ignored
  2. messages that contain negative words (hate, dislike, despise, etc.) should be ignored
  3. messages coming from MY profile should be ignored

There are undoubtedly other rules that could be added, but I’ll leave that open in the comments.  Marketers certainly have their work cut out for them when it comes to reaching people online but, with a few simple filters, they would undoubtedly have a better chance of reaching potential customers rather than annoying thousands of people and (possibly) damaging their brand image.

What do you think of companies that have machines read our Tweets and auto-follow us in the hopes that we will care about their products? Are there any rules you’d like to see added to the auto-follow bot filter I listed above?  I’d love to hear your thoughts.